The following article comes with permission from David Rothman’s excellent blog, davidrothman.net: Exploring Medical Librarianship and Web Geekery.

I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists because they frequently contain useful information, but being subscribed to these lists using the email account provided by our hospital would be problematic. The volume of postings on some lists would clutter up the acount, making it more difficult to manage and making it more likely I’d miss other, more important emails from inside our organization.

So I subscribe to lists using a Gmail account. Here’s why:

• Separating list emails into a separate account allows me to treat them, as a whole, in a different manner than emails from higher-priority senders (patrons, co-workers, etc.). This lets me keep my attention focused where it needs to be.
• Because list emails are in a separate account, I also never have to annoy other list subscribers with “out-of-office” messages that get sent to whole list- because there’s never need to turn on an “out-of-office” message for this account.
• Threaded conversation: Instead of having one line per each email received, Gmail inboxes have one line for each conversation. That means that my Gmail lists inbox doesn’t get as cluttered. It also lets me efficiently manage whole conversations instead of individual emails, even if a particular email is sent to multiple lists I subscribe to. Example image below shows that all (23) emails on the topic of “abortion” being made a stopword in POPLINE are one (expandable) line item in my Gmail inbox:
• Mute function: If there’s a particular conversation(/thread) that I’m not interested in continuing to follow, I can “mute” the conversation and not need to see any further emails in that thread.
  
• Gmail’s search capabilities are awesome. If I want to find a MEDLIB-L email I remember was sent by Michelle Kraft about OvidSP, I can search for label:medlib-l from:Kraft OvidSP and find it really, really quickly.
• Gmail’s filters are powerful and easy to use.
  • Assigning labels: You can set up your Gmail filters to automatically assign colorful labels based on information that lets you scan your email quickly. For example, you could set your account up to automatically assign colored labels based on which list the conversation is from.
  • Forwarding based on content: You can combine Gmail’s great searching and filtering to monitor your list subscriptions. Say you subscribe to multiple lists, but only really want to pay attention if Young Adult services are mentioned. I can create a filter from the search for young OR youth OR “YA” and set any hits from that search to be automatically forwarded to my primary email address so it comes to my attention. Imagine the time saved by not having to manually look through all those emails for mentions of the topic I want to follow.

Bonus tip: Would you rather read your list email information in your feed aggregator? Set your lists Gmail account to forward the emails to MailBucket, and MailBucket will give you the content in an RSS feed.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ma08/ma08_my_ncbi_collections.html

The April issue of NIH News in Health, the monthly newsletter bringing you practical health news and tips based on the latest NIH research, is now online at http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/. In this issue of NIH News in Health: http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/pdf/NIHNiH%20April08.pdf

When a Medical Emergency Strikes

A Race Against the Clock

If you’re seriously injured, your recovery-and even your life-can depend on how quickly the emergency medical team arrives, what type of treatment you get and how fast they get you to a hospital.

Guard Your Liver: Protect Yourself From Hepatitis Hepatitis can make you feel as if you have the flu, but it’s a completely different disease. Flu is caused by viruses that attack your lungs and respiratory system; hepatitis is a liver disease. Some forms of hepatitis get better on their own. But others can inflict serious liver damage, and may even leave you needing a new liver.

Health Capsules:

• Allergens in Homes Linked to Asthma
• Diet and Metabolic Syndrome
• Featured Web Site: Anabolic Steroid Abuse

Title: American journal of disaster medicine

ISSN: 1932-149X (Print) Title Abbreviation: Am J Disaster Med

Publication Start Year: 2006 Publisher: Prime National Pub. Corp.

Subject Term(s): Emergency Medicine, NLM ID: 101291100

“The journal has one goal: to provide physicians and medical professionals the essential informational tools they need as they seek to combine emergency medical and trauma skills with crisis management and new forms of triage.” (http://www.pnpco.com/pn03000.html)

Title: BMC emergency medicine

ISSN: 1471-227X (Electronic) Title Abbreviation: BMC Emerg Med Publication Start Year: 2001 Publisher: BioMed Central,Country: England Subject Term(s): Emergency Medicine, NLM ID: 100968543

“BMC Emergency Medicine is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in all aspects of emergency medicine, trauma, and pre-hospital care.” (http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcemergmed/)

Title: Disaster medicine and public health preparedness

ISSN: 1935-7893 (Print) 1938-744X (Electronic)

Title Abbreviation: Disaster Med Public Health Prep Publication Start Year: 2007 Publisher: Lippincott Williams & WilkinsSubject Term(s): Emergency Medicine,
Public Health, NLM ID: 101297401

“This is a comprehensive and authoritative journal emphasizing public health preparedness and disaster response for all health care and public health professionals.”

(http://www.dmphp.org/misc/about.dtl#AboutAMA)

The new Health Care Notification Network system was created by Medem of San Francisco, California. It is supported by a group of pharmaceuticals, insurance firms, organizations, and medical centers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, J and J, as well as the American College of Surgeons, among others (full list at http://www.hcnn.net/docs/HCNNSupporters.pdf). The network will be using email to quickly disseminate time sensitive drug safety alert information to health care professionals.

• HCNN replaces the current, paper-based alerts sent to physicians and other healthcare providers via U.S. mail.
• Alerts include medication recalls, warnings and national public health emergencies.
• HCNN fulfills new FDA guidance for electronic communication of patient safety notification and is supported by medical liability carriers, U.S. medical societies, national patient advocacy groups, health plans and many other national healthcare organizations that are dedicated to improved patient safety.
• HCNN protects healthcare provider privacy. No email addresses will be sold or disclosed to any third parties.

Registration for U.S. physicians and other health care providers is available immediately at http://www.hcnn.net. For more information about the HCNN and online patient safety Alert services, see http://www.hcnn.net.

April is Donate Life Month. Visit the MedlinePlus organ donation topic page to learn more. The following four sites exemplify the breadth and specificity of links to organ donation materials for consumers.

• What Every Patient Needs to Know from the United Network for Organ Sharing http://www.unos.org/SharedContentDocuments/Patient_Booklet(1).pdf
• Organ Donation 101 [and Ethnic Minorities] from the U. S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health http://www.omhrc.gov/templates/content.aspx?ID=3123
• Bone Marrow Donation: What to Expect When You Donate from the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research) http://www.mayoclinic.com/print/bone-marrow/CA00047/METHOD=print
• Organ Donation and Transplantation from the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ National Women’s Health Information Center http://womenshealth.gov/faq/organ_donation.htm

National LGBT Health Awareness Week is a way for health librarians and health care organizations to promote lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) health in their communities.

The theme of the 2008 National LGBT Health Awareness Week is Take Action. This is a call to Take Action in improving the health of the LGBT community. Fuller information, resources, contacts and sponsors can be found at National Coalition for LGBT Health site: http://www.lgbthealth.net/awarenessweek08/. There is also LGBT health and wellness information within MedlinePlus, at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/gaylesbianandtransgenderhealth.html. Go Local has offerings as well. Note those in North Carolina, at http://www.nchealthinfo.org/resources.cfm?info=0,247,102,0,0.

We’ve made some changes to SEA Currents in the hopes that the newsletter will be easier to use and to make it more interactive.

First we’ve opened Comments to the world. All you need to do is enter the name you wish to appear on the comments-a real name, or a nickname, or whatever you like, and an email address. The email address will not show up on the public post, but is meant to keep machines from posting comments directing us to online drugstores or even less savory locations. So, please, comment away! (If your comments do not show up immediately, do not panic, our comment filter may believe that your comment is comment spam and is holding on to it for an administrator to allow it. Give us at least one business day to allow comments before emailing us to see what happened.)

Second, we now have a link on the lower left-hand side of the screen allowing readers who do not want come to our website or make use of RSS subscriptions to subscribe via email. If you register using this link, you will receive the text of SEA Currents posts as soon as they are published. If you have already registered at the SEA Currents site, please do so again, since we are not assuming that everyone who registered initially wants email notifications. To register immediately go to  the email registration page.

We hope you enjoy reading SEA Currents and that the experience has become richer for you with these additions. If you have other improvements to suggest, please let us know.

http://newsroom.hrsa.gov/releases/2008/poisonhelp.htm

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has announced a new poison prevention campaign. The Poison Help Campaign addresses the alarming statistics on poisonings in the United States. This past year, more than 2.4 million poison exposures were reported to the nation’s network of Poison Control Centers (PCCs). Unintentional poisoning deaths are the second leading cause of injury death for U.S. adults.

The campaign features a new Web site, http://PoisonHelp.hrsa.gov, with downloadable resources to inform and educate the public on poison prevention, and the national Poison Help toll-free number (1-800-222-1222) that callers can use to reach a PCC. The Campaign also serves as a resource for health professionals, PCC staff, and injury prevention organizations.

Consider subscribing to the Poison Control Program Update, a quarterly newsletter describing current and upcoming program activities and highlights new poison prevention resources. http://poisonhelp.hrsa.gov/news_winter08.htm

To receive future newsletters via e-mail, contact HRSA at comments@hrsa.gov.

http://www.omhrc.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=3&lvlID=297

The Office of Minority Health has chosen A Healthy Baby Begins with You as the theme for its work during National Minority Health Month in April, and calls on state and local governments and offices of minority health to organize events and put forth proclamations to bring due attention to this issue. See more about this event at: http://www.omhrc.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2&lvlID=182

OMH invites communities to host A Healthy Baby Begins with You events during the month and throughout the year, and will list events to be held on its web site, www.omhrc.gov. The web site also has materials to help communities organize their events.

“This campaign is part of a broader National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities that OMH has introduced to combat health disparities in all communities,” said Dr. Graham. “We are pleased to work with all of our partners to help bring an end to preventable infant deaths.”

The campaign’s brochure, including tips for a healthy start for mothers and babies, is available for download at http://www.omhrc.gov/Assets/pdf/checked/brochure.pdf. An assortment of campaign posters available include:

Main Campaign Poster PDF - 29.4 mb)
Tonya Campain Poster (PDF - 4 mb)
Campaign Folder (Poster - 6.5 mb)
Campaign Quick Card (PDF - 6.5 mb)

Additionally, the OMH also has developed a new section on its website: the Capacity Building Division webpage. Here you will find samples of their work along with interactive training and educational materials to assist your organization in growth. http://www.omhrc.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2&lvlID=66